Objects in late medieval Europe were a means for lay people and clergy to negotiate their access to powers beyond the everyday, in folk practice as well as religious observance. As has been noted by scholars, this period is marked by a profusion of objects granted special importance, imaginary as well as material. These objects prompt reconsideration of cultural and intellectual frameworks, for example of superstition, reform, and heresy, that never quite successfully contain them. Essays in this volume center attention on these things themselves, from puppets to rosaries, as indeed do the written accounts through which they are often mediated. With a focus on England, contributors re-evaluate our understanding of works and authors including Geoffrey Chaucer, Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love, Julian of Norwich, miracles of the Virgin, Edward Hall’s Chronicle, the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.
Price: $150.00
Pages: 310
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture
Publication Date:
07 October 2025
ISBN: 9781526181053
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
Literary studies: ancient, classical & medieval, Material culture, European history: medieval period, middle ages, History of religion
Fiona Somerset is Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut
Joshua S. Easterling is Associate Professor of English at Murray State University, Kentucky
Introduction – Joshua S. Easterling and Fiona Somerset
Part I
1 Prayer is a bead is a rose: the rosary material and immaterial – Claire M. Waters
2 Believing in the pardoner’s objects – Shannon Gayk
3 Christ-objects in Middle English drama – Sarah Salih
4 Ornamental habits – Anke Bernau
Part II
5 My yoke is soft: object as metaphor in Cambridge University Library MS Ff.6.31– Fiona Somerset
6 Apophasis in an age of image defence: situating the Cloud-author corpus in fifteenth-century England – Christiania Whitehead
7 Image and garment: reforming the object-self in Walter Hilton – Joshua S. Easterling
8 The matter of belief: Nicholas Love’s erotic rhetoric in defense of the doctrine of the real presence – Michael G. Sargent
Afterword – Robyn A. Bartlett
